1. Dialing For Dollars Group D Jim Purvis, Pam Roslonek, Keith Poirier

2. Summary A company’s quarterly earnings are well below expectations. A salespersons boss tells him to be very creative to get customers to buy more of the product to make the earnings higher for this quarter. This will cause the salesperson to make unethical decisions. The salesperson makes agreements with customers even though he knows accounting department would not approve of his selling techniques. He created a fictional company to sell too. Computer system registered this quarter to be higher than normal, causing it to recommend the company to increase production.

3. Is it ethical to write the email agreeing to take the product back? If that email comes to light later what do you think your boss will say? It is unethical to write a false email to the customer promising something that can not be given to them. If email comes to light later, the employee may be fired. Company may deal with lawsuits from the customers.

4. Is it ethical to offer the “advertising” discount? What effect does that discount have on your company’s balance sheet? It is unethical for you to offer the advertising discount. Balance sheet will be off because the advertising cost will never be present The balance sheet will continue to be incorrect for the entire year.

5. Is it ethical for you to ship to the fictitious company? Is it legal? It is unethical to ship to a fictitious company It is illegal because you will be falsifying your records to make your sales look better

6. Describe the impact of your activities on next quarter’s inventories. Next quarter’s inventory will be off The Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) system will have told the production center to produce more inventory without the demand needed for them

7. If you were the COO of this company, would you instruct manufacturing to ignore the sales increase? I would tell them to ignore the sales increase because we would then have excess inventory, costing us more money.

8. What would you do if you were the salesperson in this situation? I would make whatever sales I could in an ethical matter. By doing something this wrong, it can turn into big problems for myself and the company.

9. What, in your opinion, should this company do? They should cut their losses for this quarter and push harder to boost their sales. It’s not worth having legal problems down the road.